anything is possible

welcome to A Teetering Vulture! a newsletter about various science stuff as well as the life happenings of its author, Yale.

I love that frogs know when it’s about to storm, that some of them have a specific croak to describe their knowledge of a storm’s approach. I love lichen, love how they are composites of two, three, four different organisms—how they contain, are constituted of, photobiont, mycobiont, sometimes an additional photobiont, sometimes also a yeast. I love "I Love My Wife," the song by the Cincinnati, Ohio-based band Touchdown Jesus, which was just released on April 4, last week. I love membranous pelt lichen specifically, its name and its appearance–slimy and soft, both, at once—but also other lichens and their names. Someone took a picture of membranous pelt lichen on the Isle of Man on March 15, last month. Here is a photo:

I love that I went to the bookstore this morning to buy a book of poems by Ada Limón and couldn’t find any of her books in the poetry section, but found one instead right next to a book of short stories I was also looking for. I love matcha and many other teas and coffee, the hot and cold liquid flavors of plants: the baffling diversity of two plants, grown and dried and twisted and ground and prepared differently. I love sitting on the floor when I’m sweaty or dirty and watching a YouTube video before I shower—going to Lisbon, Portugal on the floor with a vlogger from Spassk, Russia when I’m dirty or sweaty right before I take a shower. I love professional YouTube philosophers: CJ The X, Abigail Thorn, Natalie Wynn. Trans women, two of them—I love trans women and I love trans people, in general, and internet people. Queer people online, their humor—specifically people on Tumblr, their humor in 2025, their relatable manner of confronting relentless bad tidings by being both self-possessed and unhinged. Here is a photo:

I love Dasha and I love Madison and I love Dasha (the second Dasha). The second Dasha and the first Dasha (in any order, I love them) and the only Madison, the one who taught me about northern parulas. I love northern parulas, their small bodies, their grey and yellow plumage, their buzzy trill; the first parula trill I’ve heard in 2025 I heard today right when I finished jogging at the park, in the parking lot, the park where I also heard the frog that predicted the storm, the park where I saw a barred owl kill something and then take a nap, last week. I love barred owls also, if we’re talking about birds—love their facial discs full of tiny innumerable feathers arranged like layer upon layer of flaky soft shale or like complicated sheafs of cake icing, creamy grey and white and brown icing. Here is a photo:

I love the eyeliner on the woman I saw at the dry cleaner’s, how it encircled both of her eyes completely, how she was there last year too, the last time I went to the dry cleaner’s, and she wore the same eyeliner then. I love how strange and ambitious I am, also how idiotic, how loving. I love when people tell me I’m doing a good job and when they tell me they like me. I love that a strange and ambitious person sometimes needs to drop a rug off at the dry cleaner’s and then go buy a book of poems, must come home and eat a bowl and a half of lentil soup and spend half an hour searching her blog archive for one specific photo, for reasons yet to be articulated. Here is the photo:

I love the writing prompt, ‘In five minutes, write as many sentences beginning with ‘I love’ as you can’—though I’ve gone several hours over five minutes. I love that I paused writing this to consider building a website for myself, investigated a website for building websites and hovered my cursor over ‘Start Free Trial’ and everything. Because I am strange and ambitious and always seeking to do a good job. I love that now I’m back here, back on this page, and I love that it has stopped storming and now everything’s soaked—specifically I’m thinking of the frog, glistening, sticky, its eyes closed against luscious droplets of stormwater, somewhere in the grass. I love the bright green, useless grass outside—below the windowsill where the binoculars sit—and the pavement where I went roller skating yesterday (both also soaked, saturated, full). I love roller skating and I love doing badly at fun things. I love my roller skates and what it feels like to skate, to contemplate having the course of my life altered by an errant crack or pebble. Here is a photo:

I love that Anything is possible even though it’s not. Even though an errant pebble could cause me to crash and badly destroy my hand or my knee, thus ruining the possibility of my ever doing something spectacularly athletic or specific with that hand or that knee. But Anything is possible still, always. I love that the kid in that photo is Phil Lester. I love that more than twenty years after that photo was taken I took a photo with Phil Lester, which is not here, which is a photo for me. I love things for me, things kept and secreted away from everyone for ages in my brain and on my phone and my computer; I love the things I write for me, like this. But also things for you, like this—I love writing things for other people. I love that you’re here reading this, and that, of course, Anything is possible for you, too.

Chen Chen's chapbook You MUST Use the Word Smoothie: A Craft Essay in 50 Writing Prompts inspired this newsletter.

The book of Ada Limón's poetry I bought is called Bright Dead Things.